On 06/08/2010 02:15 PM, Frederick N. Brier wrote:
I installed PBX In A Flash (PIAF) as a VM on a Fedora 11 64 bit host.  PIAF is a 32 bit CentOS 5.2 distro for running Asterisk.  I, like many others, am getting the error message "rtc: lost some interrupts at 1024hz" repeating over and over on the console.  Some people have apparently gotten rid of this error message by disabling hpet in the BIOS.  However, this is a VM (kvm).

I tried adding nohpet as a kernel parameter in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that effects the linux OS, not the BIOS.  It did not fix it.

I found references to a -no-hpet qemu parameter.  However, I cannot find how to set it in a VM created using virt-manager and an ISO image.  In the /etc/libvirt of the host I found XML configuration files describing the VMs.  These appear to be the same as those created using the virsh dumpxml command.  There does not appear to be an XML element as there is for acpi and apic.  The man page describing the XML format does not have an HPET related option.  I could not find an example or sample of it being disabled in a libvirt XML file.  Nor does there appear to be a schema (xsd or dtd) for the libvirt file format, which might have had an hpet element or attribute.

Ideally, is there a way to disable HPET in the BIOS for a specific VM, and not all VMs.  Thank you.

If you are running libvirt 0.8.0 or newer, and if your qemu-kvm supports the -no-hpet option (check the output of "qemu-kvm --help"), you can add the -no-hpet option for qemu-kvm for a particular domain by editing the domain's XML (with "virsh edit domainname") and adding

    <timer name='hpet' present='no'/>

to the "clock" section. It will end up looking something like this:


  <clock offset='utc'>
    <timer name='hpet' present='no'/>
  </clock>